Götz Aly’s Why the Germans? Why the Jews? as a Supplement to Elon’s The Pity of It  All

   I just finished reading Why the Germans? Why the Jews? Envy, Race Hatred, and the Prehistory of the Holocaust, a 2011 book now in English by the German historian and journalist, Götz Aly.  (Oh so by the way, Herr Aly was born in 1947 in Heidelberg, exactly twenty years after I was born in the same city by the Neckar.)  His book overlaps significantly with Amos Elon’s 2002 volume, The Pity of It  All, 1743-1933, which I read some years ago and which, to my astonishment, is not included in the extensive Aly bibliography.  I don’t intend to review either book, but will merely give a short account of a couple of light bulbs that went on in my head when reading the Aly essay.

   The title of Elon’s book says a lot.  In spite of persistent anti-Semitism in Germany, the half million or so Jews made a huge amount of progress in that period before the fateful January of 1933.  Restrictions on what they were permitted to do were progressively reduced until, during the Weimar Republic, Jews played leading roles in law, medicine, education—including in the university professoriate—in journalism and various levels of government and civil service (an uncle of mine was a high-up official in the German railway system) and, of course, in banking and business.  I say “of course,” because during the centuries in which Jews were prohibited from owning land and thus prevented from farming; kept out of the guilds and thus incapable of engaging in the crafts: no Hans Kahn as a Jewish version of the Meistersinger:  Schuhmacher und Poet dazu.  That left trade—from lowly peddling to importing and exporting goods of all kinds—and banking; the latter abetted by Christian

restrictions on charging interest.

   With the waning of Christianity-based anti-Semitism that regarded Jews as Christ-killers, much of more recent anti-Semitism is rooted in those “traditional” occupations with Jews seen as money-grubbing, devious, manipulative, conspiratorial, etc.

   The Aly book also gives an account of Jewish successes in Germany during a period that is a bit shorter than that covered by Elon.  A main theme of his, however, is to look at these achievements in comparison with those of non-Jewish Germans.  So he notes, for example, that a striving Jewish father would work hard and scrimp to provide his sons with an education of quality, assuring what today we call “upward mobility” for his offspring.  In that same period, many a non-Jewish father, Aly reports, would scheme to get his son a job in the postal service to assure that the son will receive a pension from the state when he retires.  This, by way of concrete example of the contrast between the Jewish impulses of individual initiative—what today is one meaning of liberalism—and the German desire for protectionism, that is, a brand of statism.

   As background to these kind of examples, the book sketches out a historical account of the disunity and wars of the German Länder and above all most recently, Napoleon’s devastating invasion.  All these developments had a large proportion of Germans living in small towns.  At the same time Jews, many of whom were later arrivals from the East, were concentrated in the larger cities.  

   In support of his aim to depict Jewish ambition and drive, Aly provides, among other examples, statistics that show Jews to be successful as students in significant schools (which he contrasts with the mediocrity of most conventional German schools) and, especially, at the level of the university.  This Jewish participation in education of quality was vastly greater than would be predicted from the size of the Jewish population—shockingly so.  In addition to statistics, the author also provides anecdotal examples of individuals, including some from his own family.  An important conclusion: a weighty ingredient in German anti-Semitism and one that of course remains mostly unexpressed, is envy.

   There is a notable contrast, as well, at the collective level.  Jews, though dispersed around the globe during two millennia and more often persecuted than not, nevertheless have always had a coherent tradition, rooted in significant myths and a history of elders and sages.  They possess, as well, a common language with its own alphabet.  As late as 1870 there was no such entity as a German nation nor was it clear which Teutonic dialect would become the official German language.  Jews have precisely the “deep, meaningful roots that patriotic Germans were forever digging for”—a void that was filled with the invention of the sacred German race.  This disparity between the German and Jewish—call it heritage—was another largely unspoken source of envy.

   Why should this highlighting of Germans’ envy of Jews have a bulb flicker  in my head?  Not because I think it explains why a considerable number of Germans actually engaged in the murdering of Jews.  For that account one might have to go to Daniel Goldhagen’s “eliminationist anti-Semitism,” though I propose to stay away from that controversy.  Rather, I think that envy is a partial explanation for the fact the largest number of Germans simply turned their gaze away from what was happening to their Jewish neighbors.

   While, perhaps, apathy needs no explanation because it is everywhere the normal state, Götz Aly puts forward two further reasons why somewhat later so much of the German citizenry looked the other way.  Many of them profited from the persecution of the Jews.  When Jews were barred from a large number of positions and jobs, those became openings for German gentiles.  When Jewish businesses were closed, competition was shrunk for those who remained.  When Jews began to emigrate, middle class housing became available at bargain prices.  And when, after the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, the Endlösung of the Jewish question was unleashed, the spoils for German gentiles were multiplied a thousand fold.  Still, universal customs have it that one grabs quietly and does not talk about dubiously gotten gain.

   A further Aly-introduced (at least to me) component in the explanation of the apathy of the greatest portion of the German Volk are practices engaged by Hitler long before 1942.  In order to ensure the purity of the future German race, a two-fold practice was initiated.  Large numbers of German men and women were sterilized to prevent those that were regarded as likely to have “unwanted” offspring from having children. The second practice was more drastic still.  Those adjudged to be physically or mentally unfit were quietly “euthanized.”  That term, too, refers to a medical procedure or to the slaying of animals.  There were probably few Germans who did not know someone who had suffered a loss in one of these ways.

   Why bring up these “procedures,” engaged  long before the Endlösung der Judenfrage was initiated?  Because they contributed significantly to inuring the German population.  Enforced sterilization, a violent incursion into a person’s private life was somehow converted into a necessity for the commonweal  The killing of those regarded as unfit was not murder of human beings, but either a  needed medical procedure or the equivalent of euthanizing a sick animal.  In short, in the minds of ordinary Germans these precedents converted the killing of Jews from the most cruel instances of murder into measures that were drastic but necessary for the future benefit of all.  It’s best to look the other way.

   I’m not a historian, not a historian of Germany nor of the Holocaust; just an occasional reader of material that pertains to me as a Jew born in Germany six years before it became a Nazi state.  For me, Götz Aly’s Why the Germans? Why the Jews? has provided me with some new insights.